As his party’s prospects in the November midterms sink in concert with his approval ratings, President Trump has been fuming at Senate Republicans to nuke the filibuster and pass the SAVE America Act, a suite of restrictions on voting in federal elections that could effectively disenfranchise millions of voters. Majority Leader John Thune isn’t budging, for now, but he may attempt to placate Trump and MAGA hard-liners with a complicated workaround.The SAVE America Act mandates that voters prove citizenship when they vote, and in all but five states a driver’s license would not satisfy that requirement. It would also tighten rules on mail-in voting and require states to submit voter rolls to a federal database to check voter citizenship (even though cases of noncitizens voting are incredibly rare). The bill sailed through the GOP-controlled House last month before stalling in the Senate, where it would need 60 votes—and thus some Democratic support—to overcome the filibuster. The Republicans are thus attempting to shoehorn the bill’s key provisions into the budget reconciliation process, which would only require a simple majority of 51 votes to pass. But using this maneuver won’t be a panacea—in fact, some conservatives grumble it will doom their efforts to make the SAVE America Act the law of the land. “It’s hard to imagine how the SAVE America Act could be passed through reconciliation,” GOP Senator Mike Lee wrote on social media last week. “And by ‘hard’ I mean ‘essentially impossible.’”Given that the bill focuses on voting laws, not funding levels, it seems highly unlikely to pass muster with the rules that govern this special process. Reconciliation is typically employed as a tool to approve a president’s budgetary priorities without input from the other party; it was last used to pass Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which dramatically slashed social spending and extended certain tax breaks. But let’s consider how Republicans might go about it.Any discussion of reconciliation requires some mind-numbing discussion of Senate operating procedure. So, to paraphrase Olivia Newton-John—or Dua Lipa, depending on your generation—Let’s get technical. Reconciliation allows the majority to avoid the filibuster for certain legislation. It first requires the majority party in both chambers of Congress to draft and adopt a budget resolution, which will lay out the guidelines for crafting the eventual bill. Leaders of the House and Senate Budget Committee have tentatively begun this process; as Senate Committee Chair Lindsey Graham recently wrote on social media, “The reconciliation train is leaving the station.” He has also said that, along with approving such priorities as increasing funding for homeland security, reconciliation could be used to “improve voter integrity,” a nod to the SAVE America Act.However, there is a major catch: A reconciliation bill must be explicitly budget-related, permissible only for changes to the debt limit, revenues, and direct spending. Any provision that is not directly related to the budget is thus subject to removal under the “Byrd rule.” If a senator raises a point of order that a provision is extraneous, the parliamentarian could issue guidance urging its removal. Even before the legislation is formally considered, the Senate parliamentarian advises senators on whether there are portions that could violate the rule, a process cutely known as the “Byrd bath.”Therein lies the rub for an effort to include the text of the SAVE America Act in a reconciliation bill: It probably would get washed out in the Byrd bath. The bill is largely regulatory, regarding how states administer elections. “These changes don’t really have an impact on the deficit that aren’t more than just sort of incidental to the provision,” said Sarah Binder, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institute.The guidance of the parliamentarian is not binding, and in theory, the Senate Republican majority could choose to ignore or overrule that ruling. But Thune has previously likened this option to “killing the filibuster,” and has recently indicated that he would respect any parliamentarian decision in a future reconciliation bill.It’s not unusual for senators to write legislation in such a way as to circumvent the rules outlined by budget reconciliation rules. Most recently, Senate Republicans used a complicated maneuver to write the One Big Beautiful Bill Act such that it appeared not to add to the deficit, and thus did not violate the Byrd rule.Matthew Glassman, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University, said that Republican lawmakers could find a way to argue that the SAVE America Act would have an impact on the budget, such as conditioning federal dollars to states on implementing its provisions. But that might be a tough argument for Republicans to make.